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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

This article is the best argument for unsupervised free play that I've seen. Adults have no business moralizing and interfering as children negotiate relationships on their own. It's developmentally important. Children who lack that experience will constantly look for authoritative arbiters of the relationships. That's the soil that societal authoritarianism grows in.

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Absolutely not. “Negotiation of relationships” practically means bullying and all sorts of antisocial and abusive behavior. There must be boundaries set by adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

"Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they "hover overhead", overseeing every aspect of their child's life constantly.[1][2] A helicopter parent is also known to strictly supervise their children in all aspects of their lives, including in social interactions."

"study from the University of Florida found that helicopter parenting was associated with more emotional problems, struggles with decision-making and worse academic performance in a group of 500 students"

False dichotomy. There's a fucking gradient there between helicoptering and total lack of rules and boundaries. Plus helicopter parenting is often the opposite of having boundaries anyway!

Right!? This person must have never been on the bottom of the social totem pole in school or I guess thought suffering traumatic abuse made them stronger or something.

The power struggles of kids at that age are honestly more extreme than what adults face because kids are forced to interact, have low agency outside of play, and underdeveloped empathy.

How much of that totem pole exists just because kids are kids, or because of the arbitrary environment, imposed by the adults, wherein they find themselves?

See also various animal studies (like the wolf "alpha/beta/omega" stuff) that turn out to be total nonsense because the behaviors involved are the result of the animals crammed together in unnatural ways by humans.

This is the best comment here. The most successful children in elementary school are the ones who have gone through those social conflicts in preschool and worked things out for themselves. Sometimes that means mental conflict, sometimes that means not engaging with your peers and then having to forgive, barter, trade, etc.

Sometimes that means being beaten up for fun, or having your belongings stolen or destroyed, or being the victim of power games.

It's a great way to learn some deeply ingrained life lessons like "all of my peers are out to hurt me" and "I can't truly trust anyone who claims to be my friend".

Those are pretty difficult to root out and persist into adulthood.

Sometimes that means being fucked up mentally and physically while the adults in your life look on, making excuses.

Yeah, that’s a recipe for success.

Sometimes that means kids being bullied and having that affect them quite strongly. Not actually a great idea.

Might makes right, huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

Luckily, real life seems to work out better than fiction:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

Children have had free play for millennia. Supervised play in after-school programs like the one described in the article is relatively new.

Children have also been bullied by other children for millennia.

And they will be, for millennia to come! Bullying is a vile part of human nature, there is no preventing it or stopping it all together.

If we can't prevent it or stop it altogether shouldn't we still try to minimize it? Or do we want to just have open season. Runts of the litter in nature tend to get bullied away from vital nutritional resources and dying - we've obviously decided it's a good idea to intercede in that case as humans so where are we drawing the line - where our neanderthalic ancestors drew the line? where victorians draw the line? where our parents drew the line? I think it's fair to consider that child rearing is an activity in constant evolution we should strive to make childhood a balanced experience to prepare children for life - that includes not exposing them to either excessive bullying along with coddling.

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